5 Things to Include on Your Content Pages to Maximize Sales Impact

With conversion rates up to 600 percent higher than outbound methods, content marketing has become a cornerstone marketing strategy used by businesses. However, writing high-quality content will only translate into sales if it’s properly optimized.

So, include the five following items in your content to generate more sales.

1. Trust Seals

Adding trust seals to your content pages makes your site more credible and trustworthy. This, in turn, can boost your site’s conversion rate. A survey cited by Forbes found that 88 percent of e-commerce shoppers say trust seals are important, and 79 percent expect to see them on a site’s homepage. Popular trust seals include McAfee, PayPal Verified, Better Business Bureau (BBB), TRUSTE, Norton and Thawte.

2. Contact Information

In addition to trust badges, including contact information on your content pages will make your site more trustworthy, which encourages more sales.

In your site’s footer, for instance, consider adding your business’s name, address, phone number and email address. When visitors see your contact information displayed here, they’ll feel more confident buying your advertised products or services. If you run a local business, you can go one step further by embedding a Google Maps view of your business on your site.

3. Visitor Comments

Whether it’s a blog post or article page, don’t disable visitor commenting. Allowing visitors to comment on your content pages conveys a higher level of transparency. Visitors can read the comments to see what other users have to say about your site and business. Assuming you offer a high-quality product or service, you’ll likely attract some positive visitor comments that serve as testimonials. And with 88 percent of users trusting online reviews, this can boost your site’s conversion rate.

4. CTA Button

Including a call-to-action (CTA) button on your content pages can also help to maximize sales impact. This button instructs visitors on what action they need to take to buy your product or service. Some webmasters assume that CTAs are only effective when used on their homepage. As explained by MarketingLand, though, including a CTA on every page of your site, including your content pages, will help you generate more conversions.
You don’t have to design your own CTA button. If your website is powered by the e-commerce content management system (CMS) BigCommerce, you can easily set up and integrate eye-catching CTA buttons on your site, email newsletters, social media and elsewhere. BigCommerce uses embeddable CTA buttons, meaning you just copy the code and paste it into any website’s HTML.

For more advanced capabilities, check out their new killer WordPress integration, which allows merchants to create rich shopping and content experiences combining the level of UX control offered by WordPress with the security, payment processing tech, and centralized fulfillment functions of BigCommerce. The leading e-commerce platform has supported a powerful API for some time now, allowing sellers to decouple their website management from their catalog, transaction and fulfillment management, but the WordPress plugin rollout takes the possibilities to new heights for entrepreneurs who live in WordPress.

5. Images

Finding relevant images for your content pages takes time and, in some cases, money. Due to copyright laws, you can’t copy another site’s image and publish it on your site without permission, so you have to buy stock photos or use free public domain images. Regardless, including images in your content is well worth the investment of your time and money. Images boost your site’s visibility in the search engines by displaying your site in Google Images and Bing Images. Furthermore, it makes your content more attractive while encouraging visitors to stay and read it in the process.

One study found that web pages with images generate nearly twice the number of views than text-only pages. Just remember to use relevant images that flow cohesively with the page’s content. If you’re writing about car modifications, for example, include a photo of a car or the mod, not a house or dog.

Conclusion

To capitalize on the benefits of content marketing, you must guide visitors to your checkout or conversion page. Including these items on your content pages will help you achieve this goal.